Through the Lens of Color: An Interview with Gareth Doherty, Author of Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State

Abstract

This interview by Mark Tirpak with Gareth Doherty of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, focuses on his Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017). With Paradoxes of Green (2017) and via the interview, Doherty recounts some of the findings of his ethnographic fieldwork in the Kingdom of Bahrain and describes tensions arising from differing conceptions of what ‘green’ means or signifies within this growing and predominantly arid region. An argument that Doherty makes in Paradoxes of Green (2017) is that color and form are interlinked, and that color deserves deeper consideration by policy-makers and other formal shapers of cities. The interview draws from Paradoxes of Green (2017) to discuss some of Doherty’s findings as well as his latest work on the intersections between landscape architecture and anthropology.